Grading the Cities introduction THE GOVERNMENT PERFORMANCE PROJECT Report Card: San Francisco Revenue Rank: 6 Form of Government: Mayor-Council Mayor: Willie L. Brown Jr. (took office 1997) Board of Supervisors: 11 members, elected at large FINANCIAL MANAGEMENT: B Like other California governments shell-shocked by the Orange County bankruptcy, San Francisco has put into place excellent investment policies. An independent oversight committee meets quarterly to discuss financial performance and strategy. It includes the controller, a public member appointed by the Board of Supervisors and participants from the community college district and the airport. The city, which has huge demands on its cash, has nonetheless established a conservative debt cap. By charter, bonded indebtedness is limited to 3 percent of net assessed valuation of taxable property within the city (and the city is at about half of that limit). By and large, San Francisco also has been conservative in its revenue estimates, although it’s missed a bit on expenditures in the past couple of years. Police and fire are often a bit over budget, but the chronic problem has been the public health department, which sometimes needs $20 million more than originally budgeted. Controller Ed Harrington blames this on problems with federal funding. “Wacko,” Harrington says of the feds and their unreliable practices. HUMAN RESOURCES: C City charter and civil service rules mandate competitive testing, with employees hired from formal lists of eligible candidates. In some departments, the lists include the top three scorers on a test; in others, they include anyone who meets qualifications. The city is piloting a program that allows departments to test as needs occur — particularly for specialized positions — rather than wait for periodic centralized examinations. Some jobs attract thousands of applicants, and all of them meeting minimum qualifications must be tested. That leaves insufficient funds to recruit for harder-to-fill positions. The city maintains 1,364 job classes, which makes matters worse; the more classes, the more exams. Some problems could be alleviated with better work force planning. For now, there is an insufficient centralized effort to look at the city’s future needs, although departments do engage in the practice individually. A new human resources information system should provide the data to do better on this front. INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY: C+ San Francisco’s IT management is a fragmented affair. The city has a Committee on Information Technology, whose role is to coordinate departmental efforts. But telecommunications is handled separately, under the Department of Technology Information Systems, which also manages many citywide systems dealing with finance and human services. Meanwhile, other large departments, such as the health department, have their own IT units. The city makes efforts to ensure that new systems are compatible, but “we have gone back and forth on setting standards,” says comptroller Ed Harrington. “The last great failure in this regard was selecting Wang as the one and only city standard.” A bright spot has been the new HR information system, which supports improved work force management and hiring. “In some cases, we see approvals in a half an hour that used to take weeks,” says Harrington. CityBusiness, launched in October, is San Francisco’s first e-commerce application, allowing businesses to renew tax registrations by credit card. Citizens are encouraged to provide feedback to the city and ask questions via e-mail. The tax collector has committed to responding within one business day. CAPITAL MANAGEMENT: C+ San Francisco has a six-year capital plan, but it’s described by one official as “a realistic two-year plan. The rest is more of a wish list.” That’s not hard to believe. The city gets $400 million in project requests from its agencies each year, and has a $40 million budget for capital projects. At the agency level, capital planning has been improving, and projects are being prioritized, which wasn’t true in past years. As federal aid has declined, San Francisco has tried hard to manage projects well. It is working on a centralized monitoring and reporting system. Right now, there is no single source to see if projects are completed on time or on budget. “In the ’70s, a lot of federal money was there, and we screwed up and it was easy to get more,” reports one official. City officials know quite a bit about the condition of their assets and the costs of fully funding them. Unfortunately, what they know isn’t very encouraging. Even though the city has dramatically increased spending on maintenance, streets still face an estimated $120 million backlog. Plans are to fund roughly $23 million a year, but only about 40 percent of that has been appropriated for the past several years. “Over time, residential streets with uneven rides and noticeable cracking and raveling will increasingly become the norm,” reports the city’s Transportation Capital Plan. MANAGING FOR RESULTS: C Citywide strategic planning doesn’t exist in San Francisco, although some agencies do it on their own. The good news is that the city has embarked on a new effort to better utilize performance measures than in the past. Last spring, the controller’s office focused on 10 departments to generate useful performance measures and worked closely with them on the process. The budget office met with all the rest, and came up with a number of measures that were set out separately in the budget — even if there was no actual data to fill in the newly blank spaces. Thus far, there’s no indication that the Board of Supervisors has used this information. AVERAGE GRADE: C+ Copyright © 2000, Congressional Quarterly, Inc. Reproduction in any form without the written permission of the publisher is prohibited. Governing, City & State and Governing.com are trademarks of Congressional Quarterly, Inc.